


People We Are Not

by tielan



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Fix-It of Sorts, Friendship, Gen, Road Trip, Trope Bingo Round 4
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-30
Updated: 2015-04-30
Packaged: 2018-03-26 08:23:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3843937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tielan/pseuds/tielan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>New and strange is not wrong. It just feels…different.</p>
            </blockquote>





	People We Are Not

**Author's Note:**

> I'd like to say that this is not a fix-it, because the canon doesn't bother me the way it does many others. However, I think taking this angle would have been more interesting, and presented plenty of new opportunities, while still leaving open a lot of the canon. But I guess it can read as a fix-it, and if you want to adopt this headcanon, shoot for it!
> 
> There may be more, if the characters decide to co-operate, and my brain doesn't hijack me with other bunnies.
> 
> Being used for the Trope Bingo square 'road trip'.

“So this is the American Midwest.”

Natasha’s work has been largely in cities, where power gathers and important people are wanted dead. She’s not even sure she’s ever thought of the Midwest before except as one more part of the country that sucks everything into its maw and never spits it back out.

“Depending on who you talk to.” Barton—Clint, he’s asked her to call him ‘Clint’ when they’re off-duty because he thinks they should be past surnames by now – glances over at her. “Pass the Cheeze-Its.”

She folds her legs down from the dashboard and fishes the packet of Cheeze-Its up from the melee of candy wrappers and oversized drink cups littering the leg-spaceof the passenger seat. She picks out a Reece’s Peanut Butter Cup for herself and unwraps it, biting into the sickly-sweet cup and smearing the goo across her palate.

And watches America go by.

It’s…large. And full of fields. A few towns here and there, gatherings of houses only distantly seen from the passenger seat of the rather battered old Saturn Vue they picked up in the city. Clint caught the keys tossed to him by the proprietor of the auto-repairs garage, who then looked Natasha up and down and gave Clint an open thumbs-up with a smirk.

She hasn’t asked where they’re going and Clint hasn’t told her.

And yes, it feels a little strange to have no idea of what’s going on, but Natasha’s decided to follow up on something Agent Hill said the other week:  _New and strange is not wrong. You know that._ She did. Hearing it from someone else helped, though, especially from someone who recognised she was still adjusting to the newness of everything beneath the façade of confident assurance.

So she tells herself that this is something new and strange, and that it’s not wrong to be watching a foreign countryside go by – foreign in characteristic and familiarity both.

It’s not wrong. It just feels…different.

Lunch is at a Sonic in a pass-through town. As they saunter down the street, Natasha peers at the shop windows the way the locals do, blending in. But she’s really studying the people going about their daily business – small town, ordinary people, who don’t really care about the world beyond, so long as their land and their pride remain untouched.

They can do that here, in America: not care about the world beyond. The peoples of the former Soviet cannot: too much conflict, too much upheaval, too much disruption, too much change.

Too much.

They stop at a gas station, and a young man comes by to pump the gas. He goggles at Natasha, and she feels the temptation to blow him a kiss, just for mischief’s sake. The urge to be a little naughty is also strange and new. To play without something at stake, without a bet laid down – whether the bet is her life, her mission, her reputation – that wasn’t allowed in the Red Room; would never have been permitted among its operatives. Everything had a reason, had a meaning, everything would be significant – even a teenager working in the middle of nowhere, gawky and awkward.

Natasha nixes the kiss, but smiles out the window.

Clint is chatting with the kid, the vowels of his speech drawing out, longer and lazier. And Natasha listens and marks the accent, the rise and fall of the conversation, the way Clint deflects the boy’s unsubtle questions about her without answering anything.

“You’re good with people,” she says when they drive off, heading south and west again. “That boy, the waitress at the diner—”

“Talking down rogue ex-KGB agents…” He glances over at her, watching him. “You’re good with people, too.”

“I was taught to be.” Taught to blend, to fit in, to move seamlessly through humanity – and leave blood in her wake. Not all the perfumes of Chanel can sweeten Natasha’s hands. “It’s not something I prefer.”

“Not something I prefer to do myself,” he says after a moment’s consideration. “But out here… You gotta be polite to blend in. Just one more customer, nothing special.”

“Be remembered but not memorable.”

He glances over at her and nods. “Yeah, that.”

Midafternoon sees them turning off the main highway and down a narrow road that rolls through the hills. Half an hour later, they turn onto a tree-lined lane, and fifteen minutes after that they’re trundling out of the trees at the crest of a hill.

The road leads down to a large house set in the shallow curve of a long valley between the rolling fields that rise up the hills around hem.

Clint pauses the car, looking down at the house and the lands about it. He doesn’t explain why, and Natasha doesn’t ask because she already knows. This is a coming home – a haven for him to return to. This is the moment when he leaves his job behind and becomes…someone who isn’t an Agent of SHIELD, codename Hawkeye – just Clint Barton.

She looks across at him and wonders if she’ll like ‘just Clint Barton’.

As he drives down the long, straight slope to the house, Natasha supposes she’ll find out.

The house is…bucolic. That’s the nicest thing Natasha can think to say about it, even as Clint climbs out of the car they picked up in the city. Lots of land all around. A barn, distant woods, and a tractor in grubby shades of powder blue – some remnant of 70s mod décor. A slightly faded American flag hangs from a flagpole off the porch, and there’s a woodpile half-chopped around the side.

He parks the car in the yard, the wheels crunching gravel and dirt with one last squeak as they come to a halt.

The quiet feels almost oppressive as he turns off the engine, and the iPod cuts out.

Natasha looks out the passenger window but doesn’t get out. “A safehouse?”

“About as safe as SHIELD can make it. Off the books,” he added. “I asked Fury.”

Which means there’s nothing to link them here in the records. No way they can be traced, unless someone knows how to hack into Fury’s brain.

Although, hard on that thought comes the realisation that someone in SHIELD will know about this place. This is not Russia where deals can be done under the table. There will be a title deed, and a record of ownership. There will be a money trail, because Natasha doubts that this is the kind of favour that Director Fury can call in offhand:  _I need land and a farmhouse, somewhere out of the way, with a barn and stables, and a tractor: red by preference but we can go with powder-blue. Something big and homey, looking like it just came out of a ‘Homes of America’ magazine._

This is not something that someone has tucked away in their pocket. Not even SHIELD. Not even Director Fury.

The whimsy of Fury pulling this house and the land out of his pocket lasts her until Clint shoves the door open. “Let’s go say ‘hi’ to the troops, then.”

And even as he gets out, the flyscreen over the front door pushes open and a man steps out, a toddler squirming in his arms. “Took your sweet time getting here. Lunch is cold.”

Clint doesn’t look up as he hauls their duffels out of the trunk. “Had company. And the highway’s crawling with cops. You dropped into old habits again?”

“Unlike some, I know when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em,” says the man, jiggling the toddler in his arms. His eyes look over Natasha as she unfolds herself from the car. His eyes measure her – not as a man measures a woman, but as an operative measures another operative. “Wish you knew the same.”

Clint doesn’t respond to that. He’s too busy looking around. “You did the barn without me,” he notes as they stroll over to the stairs.

“Believe it or not, I don’t need you to hold my hand every time I climb something bigger than a tree. Besides, Shelley did most of it. And yes, before you ask, she used the harness.”

“Safety first.”

They’ve reached the porch and the two men face each other. They’re of a height and of a similar build, although one is a little shorter and a little slighter, and a beard smears the line of his jaw. But the eyes are the same shape and colour, and the nose is exactly the same – broad bridged and slightly snub.

The toddler is shuffled to one arm as Clint’s brother reaches out and pulls Clint into a hug that’s returned, tight and hard, with the thump of fists against shoulder-blades, and the burble of the little girl as she puts her hand out to pat Clint’s cheek in a tactile ‘ _welcome home_ ’ which Clint answers with a kiss on the fat palm.

His brother passes him the toddler, and Clint grins and says something about ‘getting so big’ before he kisses the kid on the forehead and turns towards Natasha.

“Natasha, this is Barney. Barney, Natasha.”

“I notice he doesn’t explain the connection.” Barney holds out one hand – long and strong, at the end of an arm ropy with muscle. Here, then, is where Clint learned to arm-wrestle ‘with the best of them’.

“I wouldn’t think it’s necessary,” Natasha says, shaking hands.

“True.” The tilt of the head is an odd echo – a familiar move in an unfamiliar person. The blue eyes skim over her again, that measuring gaze. But all he says as he takes her bag from her is, “Be welcome to _casa los Barton_ , Natasha.“

And Natasha precedes the two men into the big house in the hollow between the hills.


End file.
